part eighty

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EXO COMEBACK EUREUREONG

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Re: hg: taekai spy au -- team kai -- 2525 words

[(Anonymous)]

Jongin wakes up drowning in his own sweat—or at least that's what it feels like as he sits up and squints into the darkness. The box fan Taemin's got set up in the open window isn't doing shit for air circulation and the lone sheet they'd been sleeping under is balled up on the floor. Taemin sits cross-legged at the end of the mattress, idly tracing shapes against the knob of Jongin's ankle. Circle. Star. Square. Heart. Then, very slowly, the characters: kieuk, a, ieung, i. Kai.

Jongin pulls his foot away.

"What are you doing?" he asks. It comes out gruffer than he'd intended. Taemin pulls his hands back into his lap and shakes his head.

"Heard something."

"Something?"

"Dog," he says shortly, resting his chin on his own shoulder as he cranes his neck to look back at Jongin. The curve of his spine, the ripple of musculature under his skin—it's a pretty picture. Jongin's breath catches in his chest.

"Dog? You sure that was it?" He busies himself with the sheet, tugs it back over his lower half. He's not sure why he's bothering with modesty—it's Taemin, after all—but it gives him a moment to collect his thoughts. "It's safe here, right? Nobody knows about this place?"

"Mmm. No." Taemin nods absently. "Just you."

"It's hot as fuck in here," Jongin protests, flopping back against the pillows.

"Always is this time of year." Taemin splays his hand across Jongin's stomach, the pads of his fingertips playing with the thin trail of hair creeping south from his bellybutton to below the sheets. Jongin feels like his skin's melting off and Taemin's body heat isn't helping but he still anchors Taemin's hand to his belly with his own.

"Come back to bed."




Taemin's already up and puttering around on his workbench when Jongin drags himself groaning off the mattress and onto the cold cement floor. He doesn't even look up from what he's doing, just hears Jongin feeling sorry for himself and chuckles.

"Morning, sunshine."

Jongin grunts into his forearm. "I feel like shit."

"Come on, princess. I know you're tougher than that."

Jongin rolls onto his back with some difficulty, ribs twinging, and stares up at the ceiling. "Maybe not." He hears the familiar click of a magazine locking back into place and struggles to sit up. "Expecting trouble?"

"Always." Taemin checks the safety before he tucks it into the waistband of his jeans. "You still planning on going into work today?"

"Yes."

"I figured." Taemin looks grim. "It's always hard to talk to you out of things when you've made your mind up."

"You remember." Jongin lets out an embarrassing yelp when he tries to get to his feet. His wrist isn't ready to support the weight of his body and his abdominal muscles are too preoccupied with the broken rib to be of much use. Everything's much stiffer today after a night's rest. "Fuck.."

Taemin's by his side in a flash, pulling him up by the elbow. "See? You're in no shape to—"

"I'm fine." Jongin steps out of reach and examines Taemin's handiwork from the night before. The splint's held together admirably despite the heat and Jongin's tendency to thrash in his sleep. "Give me five minutes and we'll go."

"I need to run an errand first," Taemin calls after Jongin. Jongin pauses, bare feet stilling against the gritty floor.

"Errand?"

"Won't take long, I promise."




Five minutes turns out to be wishful thinking. Everything takes more time when he's in this much pain, especially when he's trying to hide it from Taemin to avoid being called princess again. It's another twenty before Jongin's ready to go, dressed in spare clothes that Taemin drops unceremoniously in his lap. Ratty jeans, a black t-shirt, a hooded sweatshirt. They're basically the same size—Taemin's frame is perhaps a little thinner, but not so much that his clothes don't fit Jongin. He pulls the sweatshirt's hood up to obscure his face and tugs the zipper halfway.

"You look like you're ready to rob a bank," Taemin jokes, tossing Jongin a pistol of his own. Jongin catches it with his good hand and tucks it away. "Seriously, it's like thirty-five degrees out today. You're going to get heat stroke."

"I'll manage." He balls his fists into the front pockets of the sweatshirt. "So. What's this errand? Where are we going?"

"You'll see," Taemin drops enigmatically, clambering into the driver's seat of an old battered medical waste transport van. He'd slipped out sometime that morning while Jongin was still asleep to commandeer it from a nearby clinic's lot. Medical waste vans were his preferred vehicle for a number of reasons. The most important of these took Jongin by surprise: "Nobody's going to die if I borrow it for a few hours," Taemin explains, hands buried under the dashboard fiddling with the wiring.

"Surprised you take that into consideration," Jongin mumbles. Taemin frowns and opens his mouth, but Jongin's not paying too much attention and barrels on. "Anyway. Borrow? You don't just keep it around full time?"

"Stolen vehicles attract attention when they're just sitting around. If I need to use your car, I'll always return it by the end of the day." He tips his head thoughtfully. "With a full tank of gas, if I remember to." The engine roars to life and Taemin smiles like he's just won a gold medal. He probably would, Jongin thinks as the van putters through the industrial ghost town and onto a side street. If hotwiring were an Olympic sport, of course.




They pull up to the curb in front of the clinic and Taemin throws on the hazard lights, leaves it in park as he unbuckles his seatbelt and pushes out onto the street. All at once, Jongin realizes the brilliance of the medical waste truck—nobody's looking twice at the vehicle idling lazily in front of the building. Taemin certainly gets full points for tactical awareness and ingenuity. He'd make a great spy if it weren't for the gunrunning. It's too late for Taemin, though: he's bumped elbows with far too many demons of the underworld to stand a shot at a real career.

Now that he's thinking about it, it might be too late for Jongin now, too.

The errand turns out to be a delivery of something—a duffel bag, stuffed to burst that Taemin pulls from the back of the van. "You coming in?" he asks through the window. Jongin rolls it down—hand cranks, Jesus Christ, how old is this thing?—and squints.

"For what? Backup?"

"No, dumbass. For a checkup," Taemin scoffs, yanking the door open. He's got this tone he uses on Jongin when he feels something's especially urgent, authoritative and gentle all at once. His voice drops half an octave and settles into it when he says, "I know the doctor here. He's cool. He won't—you know, call the police or the press or anything like that."

The waiting room's empty, save for a few truly uncomfortable chairs and a side table piled high with magazines, stale and crinkled from thousands of anxious hands turning their pages. Taemin abandons him in favor of speaking to the nurse at the front desk, then waves goodbye as he disappears down the hallway, bag swinging from his shoulder.

"Kim Jongin-ssi?" a second nurse asks, clipboard in her hands. "You can make yourself comfortable in the first exam room. The doctor will be with you shortly."




The doctor's name is Kim Junmyeon and Jongin's, frankly, a little pissed off when he insists on a proper cast for his wrist. He's never bothered with the damn things—all they do is hinder movement, make it fucking impossible to shoot a gun. So what if he's got crooked fingers from breaking every single one at some point in the past ten years? He made the shots he needed to take. It was worth the inconvenience.

The irritation's dulled slightly when Dr Kim writes him a prescription for the broken ribs. Jongin's not a huge fan of drugs. He hates the way his reaction time slows when he's on something, prefers to stay alert even if he's really hurting. But this this time, the thought of drawing a breath without shooting pains licking up his sides sounds appealing. He's got plenty of vacation time coming. He's thinking he might actually use some of it to recover from this.

He's also vaguely pleased that Dr Kim doesn't ask too many questions about his injuries. For one, he can't remember how the fuck he got them in the first place. There's also the problem of confidentiality—even if he could remember, would it matter? Would he be able to tell him anyway? He's pretty sure he wouldn't, not without incurring the wrath of the NIS. He hears the director's voice ringing in his ears even now: "We've got doctors in-house for that sort of thing. No use involving civilians in our line of work—it's putting them directly in harm's way. The less they know, the better."

Taemin's waiting for him at the front desk, duffel bag at his feet. It's not stuffed anymore but there's still something inside that thunks, hollow and metallic, when Taemin swings it up onto his shoulder. "Oh, look at you," he teases. "Going to have the whole class sign it?"

"I hate you," Jongin informs him, voice flat. "I'm going to kill you in your sleep tonight."

Unswayed by Jongin's threat, Taemin fishes a marker from the receptionist's pen caddy and uncaps it to write his name with a flourish across the smooth plaster encasing the heel of Jongin's hand. He moves on to doodling a dragon underneath his name and he's almost finished when the receptionist returns and pushes a piece of paper across the desk. Jongin pulls his arm away from Taemin with a brusque wrench and murmurs his thanks.

Taemin drags him to the pharmacy across the street to fill his prescription. He barely waits until they're back on the street outside to shake two pills into his hand, pushes them without pretense into Jongin's mouth.

"Label says one—" Taemin claps his hand over Jongin's mouth before he can spit anything out, muffling his protests. The medicine's bitter on his tongue, crinkling his face into a disgusted pucker.

"Just fucking swallow," Taemin urges, passing him a warm bottle of water from the center console. Jongin tips half of it down his throat to wash the chalky residue from his mouth. "Good boy."

"I'm not your damn dog," Jongin growls. He wipes his face with the cuff of his sweatshirt. "What's in the bag, anyway?"

"Don't worry about it." Taemin swivels in his seat to face forward again, shifting the van into drive and nosing into the passing traffic stream. Jongin's arm itches. He settles back in his seat and tries not to think about it.




Headquarters are just under an hour away over the Han River in Seocho. Taemin drives like he's not in a hurry, drums his fingers on the steering wheel to the beat of whatever's on the radio. Occasionally he'll steal looks at Jongin, mouth slanting across his face, heavy with things he's choosing not to say. Jongin's grateful. He feels the haze of codeine settling over him like a blanket, nerves practically exhaling with relief at the chance to rest and ignore the damage he'd sustained.

"Two was overkill," he murmurs sleepily. The headrest is the only thing keeping him from slumping across the console onto Taemin's shoulder. Taemin takes his eyes off the road just long enough to aim a sharp-knuckled punch into the muscle of Jongin's thigh.

"Hey. Wake up."

"I'm awake," Jongin whimpers. It sounds more like a plea for five more minutes.

"How many fingers am I holding up, then?"

Jongin peers through bleary eyes. Taemin's throwing him the bird. "Fuck you too."

"Good job." Taemin's fingers are hesitant when they push the hair from Jongin's forehead, almost like he's asking for permission. They'd met when they were both pretending to be someone else. This—this is all unexplored territory, no longer actors playing a role in which they'd been cast. Taemin breaks the moment: "You look fucking ridiculous, by the way. Is this what all the spies are wearing this season?"

Blinking takes for fucking ever, like his eyelids are resisting the idea. At least that's how it feels when Jongin sits up and scrubs his palms across his face. "It was part of my cover."

"No wonder you got your ass kicked."

"I'll fix it."

They're double-parked in the traffic circle outside headquarters by now, blinker clicking a hemiola against the pop song whispering its way through the speakers. "We're here," Taemin announces like Jongin hasn't noticed.

Still, he doesn't move just yet. "You can just drop me here," he says. "I'll get back by myself alright. There's a bus line runs right down the street. Stops at the corner."

"I don't think it's a good idea to go inside without backup," Taemin says primly. A car honks and pulls around him. Jongin catches a glimpse of an angry fist shaking through the side window as it zooms by. "Plus," Taemin continues, "you haven't been to my place during the daylight. You'll never find it."

Jongin scoffs. "Please, Taemin. I grew up in this city."

"Let me come in with you."

"No." Jongin can be just as firm when the occasion calls for it. "You think walking into the headquarters of the National Intelligence Service with a known arms trafficker is a good idea?" He unbuckles his seatbelt. "Just go home. I'll see you later, okay?"

Taemin studies him. "You'll come back?"

"Don't have anywhere else to go," Jongin says, pushing out the door. It's mostly true. He'd abandoned the idea of renting an apartment in the city years ago when he realized he was spending a third of his paycheck on a room he only slept in a few months out of the year, if that. He rented a storage locker and crashed with somebody when he wasn't on an assignment. He preferred Chanyeol's place—the couch had a permanent indentation in the middle cushion from Chanyeol's ass that cradled Jongin better than any expensive memory foam mattress. If Chanyeol was busy, he'd go to Baekhyun's, who always kept clean sheets on the bed in the spare room, just in case. Last resort was Jongdae, if only because they saw enough of each other at work and didn't necessarily care to spend time together on their down time as well. He'd been planning on going to Chanyeol's after the Columbia assignment, but he's thinking about Chanyeol's safety now and doesn't want to risk dragging him into this any further. He'd rather not put Taemin in harm's way, either, but at least Taemin's armed and knows how to take care of himself.

"Well, give them my regards," Taemin cracks. "I'll see you later."

"Fine. Later." Jongin watches the van weave through traffic, indicator light blinking goodbye as it disappears around the bend.